BuzzRAG Culture Desk — 2026-09-09

Daniel Susskind’s What Should My Children Do? makes an unfashionably optimistic argument about technology and education: the answer to artificial intelligence is not simply to barricade the classroom. The book looks back to the influential 1979 Cockcroft report on mathematics teaching, using an earlier moment of educational anxiety to ask what today’s technological upheaval might make possible.

The most useful provocation here is not that machines will solve education’s problems, but that schools should help children understand a world in which machines are increasingly capable. That means rethinking what counts as foundational knowledge, how teachers spend their time and which forms of judgment remain stubbornly human. The optimism is welcome, though it raises the harder question of access: an AI-enabled education will only be liberating if schools can provide the tools, training and safeguards to make it equitable rather than another advantage for the already privileged.

The film documenting Oasis’s comeback is less a conventional concert record than an account of mass emotional weather. Its makers describe crowds crying and praying, police using song lyrics in briefings and a vicar turning the band’s repertoire into a sermon about reconciliation. The spectacle of the reunion became a story about how pop music can briefly reorganise public feeling.

That is a richer subject than the familiar question of whether the Gallagher brothers will fight or hug. The film follows fans, officials and observers as they project their own histories onto a band whose mythology has always depended on conflict, swagger and unresolved brotherhood. After years in which nostalgia has become a major entertainment business, Oasis offers a particularly revealing case: a reunion can sell tickets, but it can also become a communal ceremony for people measuring the distance between who they were and who they are now.

Company, Casey Affleck’s third film as director, arrives from Venice as a deliberately old-fashioned gothic anthology. Its stories gather around mysterious strangers, isolated dwellings, murder and superstition, creating the feeling of a dark tale passed from one uneasy listener to another. The result is described as diverting and creepy, with campfire theatrics doing much of the work.

Beneath the genre pleasures, the film’s pointed interest in wronged men gives the anthology a sharper social angle. That emphasis can complicate the familiar horror grammar in which male grievance is either treated as tragic destiny or exposed as a threat. Whether the film’s observations outlast its atmosphere will depend on how fully those ideas are developed, but its format gives Affleck room to move between fable, grotesque comedy and moral unease. At a festival crowded with prestige dramas, an unapologetically strange story collection can be its own kind of rebellion.

Bunker places a marriage under pressure when an architect agrees to build a luxury refuge for a technology billionaire, alienating his book-editor wife in the process. With a formidable central pairing and a premise built around wealth, fear and withdrawal from the outside world, the film appears designed to turn contemporary anxieties into an enclosed psychological thriller.

The problem, according to the critical response, is that the movie never excavates the material beneath its polished setup. A billionaire’s bunker naturally invites questions about climate dread, class insulation and the fantasy that money can purchase moral escape; a marriage strained by the project offers a human-scale route into the same themes. Instead, the thriller reportedly remains shallow, leaving its stars to wrestle with a script that cannot make the architecture of paranoia feel substantial. Venice is often generous to ambition, but this is a reminder that topical premises are not the same thing as topical insight.

Viewers looking for the seventh episode of the second season of Chad Powers have found an empty space in the schedule, prompting the predictable online question: is the episode delayed, the season shorter than expected, or has a platform simply communicated badly? The immediate story is minor, but the confusion reflects how streaming has made basic television logistics strangely opaque.

Weekly releases promise the communal rhythm of older television while retaining the platform-era habit of shifting dates, splitting seasons and burying information in menus. A missing episode can therefore become a miniature trust exercise between service and audience. Fans are not only following a plot; they are trying to understand the rules of access. The attention around this gap will likely turn on the platform’s explanation, but the broader issue is already clear: as streaming imitates broadcast appointment viewing, it is also rediscovering the obligation to tell viewers what they are watching and when.

The return of the two central witches from the 1990s cult comedy is an unabashed encounter with nostalgia, complete with generational magic, domestic chaos and the warm oddness of a story about family. The new film is reportedly as messy as its predecessor, but that roughness may be part of its appeal: it feels less like a sleek revival than an attempt to recover an eccentric seasonal mood.

The tension is familiar. Legacy sequels are asked to preserve the emotional texture of an earlier movie while proving that their return is not merely an exercise in brand maintenance. Here, the pleasures appear to come from the relationship between the characters and the film’s willingness to remain strange, even when the plotting wobbles. That may be enough for audiences who want comfort with a little disarray, but it also exposes the limits of nostalgia as a creative engine. Affection can reopen a door; it cannot, by itself, furnish the room behind it.

A new conversation about a famously understated actor’s personality turns on an appealing contradiction: the public image is built around calm, reserve and an almost conspicuous lack of performance, yet that quietness has become part of the star’s mythology. A longtime co-star’s reflections give the familiar celebrity-profile format a small human detail, presenting composure as both charm and mystery.

There is more at stake here than another round of admiration. In an entertainment culture that rewards constant access, the quiet celebrity represents a different kind of currency: attention generated by withholding it. The image can be generous, allowing audiences to project kindness and depth, but it can also flatten a person into a soothing archetype. What endures is the lesson in screen presence. Sometimes a career is sustained not by maximal visibility, but by leaving enough silence for viewers to complete the portrait themselves.